W.H. official: More tech key to education

Innovation has been slow to reach classrooms across America in part because the federal government spends very little to support basic research on education technology, a senior White House official said Tuesday.

Less than one percent — perhaps even less than a tenth of one percent — of the federal education budget is spent on research and development, said Kumar Garg, an assistant director for learning and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Garg also noted that education is a tough market for technology companies, because it’s fragmented across thousands of school districts and tens of thousands of schools.

To encourage more private-sector innovation, the Education Department is working on a “developer’s toolkit” — a handbook for entrepreneurs interested in creating technology specifically for the education market, said Richard Culatta, director of the department’s Office of Education Technology.

“There’s so much energy and excitement” around ed tech, Culatta said. “People want to come in and save the world … [but] they build apps that frankly don’t help very much.”

The toolkit will explain what teachers and students truly need, how apps are integrated into classrooms, and what research has shown about the most effective uses of technology.

It will also come with a stern warning: “For the love of all that’s good and holy,” Culatta said, “don’t forget about privacy.”

Many apps function by collecting huge amounts of information about student users as they play educational games or work through problems. The data allow the developers to tailor the software to best fit kids’ needs. But the idea of the private sector scooping up so much information about children can spook parents and teachers.

“When you’re talking about student data, we’ve got to be really careful that we’re open and transparent about how the data is used,” Culatta said, “and we have to be really, really careful that we’re not breaking trust” with parents.

Culatta said the Education Department also is working on building up a directory of educational programs — he described it as a “card catalog of digital content” — to help teachers find their way through the confusing maze of competing products.

But teachers need more than just a directory, said Nancy Hoffman, a longtime professor of education who has worked with teachers in districts nationwide. She said many teachers are bewildered by the new technology and unsure how to use it in the classroom. “Stop producing new things and [help teachers] figure out how to work with what’s already there,” Hoffman pleaded. “I’d focus on that.”

The wide-ranging discussion also touched on the bipartisan push to prepare more students for careers in science, technology and engineering and math, known as STEM fields.

Garg plugged President Barack Obama’s announcement this week of $107 million in grants to teams of high schools, community colleges and nonprofits to redesign curricula to incorporate more hands-on career training as well as internships and mentoring. But he said that program didn’t go far enough: He urged similar programs in colleges and universities as well.

“If you show up in a science or engineering program in college, you’ll be in a large lecture environment and there are huge amounts of attrition even if students are engaged and prepared,” Garg said.

At Dartmouth College, for instance, the hands-on, capstone course for the engineering program comes 10 classes into the major. “At the beginning, all you did was really hard math,” Garg said. To prevent students from getting discouraged and dropping out, “you want to give folks hands-on experiences super early.”

Noting that the percentage of women in STEM majors hasn’t changed much in decades on many campuses, Susan Singer of the National Science Foundation urged efforts to create a more welcoming culture for women and minorities in university classrooms and research labs.

“We need a holistic approach,” said Singer, director of the NSF’s division of undergraduate education.